 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision Event 2018. It's the preview event. The actual report will come out in a couple of days. We're excited to be here, get a preview. About 200-some-odd people downtown San Francisco and it's exciting times days here. A survey that goes out that thousands of executives are really what are the big themes for 2018. We're excited to have one of the authors of the survey, Michael Billets. He's a managing director of Accenture Technology Vision. Michael, great to see you. It's great to have you. So how long have you been doing these vision? I think I've been doing it for the last 10 years. 10 years. It's a long, long time. So 2018, things are moving. I can't believe we're already 18 years into this new century. What are some of the surprises that came out this year? I think the biggest surprise is how on board everybody is with the technology transformations we're going through. We've been talking about this need for companies to really become this digital business for so long that it was really surprising that this year nobody's talking about that. It's all soon. And so now companies are really starting to take that bigger look at how they're changing their industry, how they're embedding themselves into people live, and more and more they're starting to talk about what are their real responsibility with society as a whole if their businesses, their technology, their services are actually going to start changing the way that people live. Yeah. It's pretty amazing and also really changing the way people interact with businesses. I mean, it's been happening in banking for a long time where kids don't go to branches. They don't even know what a branch is. They hardly know what cash is. Much less an ATM or the neighborhood trusted banker. And the funny thing is that it's intentional is that when we started looking at the survey what we found was that there is a remarkable shift that big companies, so I think like global 2000 companies, they actually believe fundamentally that they are going to be competing based off of trust. And so they know that if they don't have the trust of their employees, the trust of the government, the trust of all of their consumers is that all the things that they want to do, they're not going to be able to do. And so they're really starting to employ this with how they act and interact with everybody. Right. It's funny how the market really drives the values because the other one obviously is increasing diversity, social responsibility. That's really being driven. Well, hey, it is good business, but it's not so much top-down as bottom-up, not only for the customers, but those same customers that you're trying to employ as these younger kids are coming into workforce. That's right. I mean, everybody's starting to read the label of companies. Is that, you know, they're fundamentally actually looking at not just what they're producing, but why they're producing it, what the ripple effects are, and how it's going to affect things at larger, and companies are taking notice. That's funny. Say, read the label. Is that talking to Michelle Dinty from Cisco? She's our Chief Privacy Officer. And she was comparing the GDPR to kind of when they enacted labeling on food, right? Before we didn't know what was in the food, we just kind of trust it. Suddenly, the law goes into effect. There's a lot of things that have to go into place, kind of a pain in the butt, but at the end of the day, it's a much better and much more trusted open information flow. Now, it definitely is, you know, but I think there's a difference between what's happening now versus what's happening then. The reason that everybody's so concerned about it now is because it's personal. It's that there are machines in your home that have a potential to listen to you. You know, your cars are making decisions on braking that are going to determine whether you're going to get into accidents. And so this connection that companies have and they want to get your data, understand who you are, and push things through your goals, those are the same things that are causing people to really stand up and pay attention that goes, whoa, I have to actually understand why they're doing this and what they're going to do with it. And honestly, it's making for not only better products because they have more information, but it's making for more socially conscious companies. Yeah, but it's interesting, right? Because when people start collecting data for a certain purpose, you know, they might not know, you know, other uses for that data down the road. So it's kind of a tough situation when you don't really know what the purposes of that data might become. That's right. And but I think that's the real positive note of what we're starting to see is that there's obviously going to be bad actors. We're never saying that they're not going to be flaws, you know, or people who are going to do the wrong thing. But we're at this really interesting point that the companies know that if they kick at the trust and have the data to make those next set of products, they're not going to be in business. And so they're policing themselves more than they have at the time. Right. This is kind of an interesting thing that's going on with all the automation because on one hand it is a much more personal connection that you can have with the company. On the other hand, we want to drive as much software automation based on data as we can. If you look at kind of the ad tech market as one of the more mature versions, you're starting to see some impacts of that where it's kind of crashing into the social. Things recently at YouTube and Facebook where a technology platform is suddenly being looked at to have responsibility as to do some type of monitoring, which then of course begs the whole, another question is to, you know, your tomatoes, my tomato. I don't know, you know, there's a whole kind of free speech element. Well, so open that up to a much broader set of interactions. It's going to be interesting times. It is. I mean, and I think that's where everybody's coming to is that on one hand you have this huge pressure around automation. It says it's just going to be more efficient to have machines doing a lot of the things that these companies do at scale. But at the same point in time is that the moment that you automate something, you change it. You change how you do your supply chain. You change how you provide medical care. You change the way the transportation system works. And the problem that people are running into as companies is that in order to automate, you have to people have the people that are going to be comfortable with the change. That means regulators have to be comfortable with the change. Your employees have to be comfortable with the change and your consumers do too. And so now that big picture of what you're looking at means that I'm not a company anymore. I'm not a service company anymore. I'm actually shaping the whole market. I want to dig into one thing of your five trends that we're going to be talking about later tonight. And that's the extended reality. Because this is a lot of AR, VR. There's so many Rs that you guys just went with a big E. We tried it. We rolled it all up into one. But it's pretty interesting because there's a bunch of demos downstairs. We just did an interview at Baobab Studios. He's trying to drive innovation around movie making and storytelling in VR. But it's really, I think it's the mix which is really going to see the quickest uptake and the quickest kind of eye delivery. It is. And we're super excited about this trend. Fundamentally because we're at this tipping point right now is that we're finally getting to a point where you see, you know, big companies like GE are using it, you know, to rewire turbines. You see, you know, folks downstairs that are helping you to build new cars to sell vehicles and do a lot of new training things. And all of these things are real happening now. But the beauty of it is that it's really just that first step to something bigger where folks are talking about, as you said, what if I'm walking around and I could have any experience or any information to buy fingertips. And that's got a big change from everything from, you know, education to healthcare, you know, to just how we live and interact with other people. Never any opportunity for a centrile. No. It is a really good time, you know, to be a technology company. And I think that's why we keep pushing every company to do it, is that this is just the beginning. Like, every time we have something new, there's so much new opportunity out there. And there's so much opportunity to really make people's lives better. And so you've got a potential to have it both ways is make money, you know, and really help people out. All right, Michael, the autonomous jazz band is getting a little loud, so I'm going to cut you loose and say thanks for taking a minute. Thanks for having me. All right, he's Michael. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Accu for the Accenture Technology Vision 2018. Thanks for watching.